Roundtable Session Annual Meeting 2024

"Paperwork is Life: Legal Status, Necropolitics, and Sovereignties"

Saturday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM | Omni-Gaslamp 2 (Fourth Floor) Session ID: A23-125
Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)

Lack of legal status renders peoples subject to direct violence by state actors. States and, to a large degree, to their populations, adopt categories such as “illegals” to justify, subtly or directly, implicitly or explicitly, disposability. Our interest in this panel is with the lived reality of those without legible legal status as “citizens” and the use of religious thought and practice to negotiate such status. This includes the investment in (or recognition of) metaphysical qualities to citizenship and its documents as well as the mobilization of religious traditions for prophetic critiques of the very notion of the nation-state and the idea of citizenship, and, ultimately, the imagination of alternative sovereignties above but also existing in tension with that of states.

Comments
There is a final panelist I am unable to add due to a problem with the PAPERS system; this panelist is Ronan Lee of Loughborough University London. He is not an AAR member.